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What We've Learned About Yachting From "Below Deck"
Put it in the shipstory books.
It's been nearly two years sinceCaptain Sandy Yawn fired Hannah Ferrier, subsequently ending the longtime chief stewardess' stint on Bravo's Below Deck Mediterranean. Hannah left the world of reality TV, but will soon returnas the cruise director onThe Real Love Boat. Additionally,it turns out the Sydney, Australia native played a big role in the development of Below Deck'snewest Peaco*ck spinoff, Below Deck Down Under.
Captain Jason Chambersactuallyrevealed that Hannah was the main reason he decided to join the show in the first place. In an exclusive interview with E! News, newlywed Hannah explained that they knew each other because "the yachting industry in Sydney is very small," so when he was asked to join Below Deck Down Under, he immediately called her.
"It's kind of funny,"Hannah said, "because a lot of people would think with how things ended on the show that I would be like, 'Don't do it!'"
However, that wasn't the case, especially since Hannah knew that as a parent, Capt. Jason would benefit from the flexibility of doing Below Deck Down Under paired with "a few deliveries throughout the year" rather than working on a permanent position.
So, she talkedhimthrough the process of joining the show. Then when Hannah's good friend Aesha Scott found out she'd be serving as Capt. Jason's chief stewardess, she provided the same support.
Karolina Wojtasik/Bravo
"We spent a lot of time on the phone," Hannah said of Aesha. "Obviously, as a chief, you've got a lot of things that make your life easier like schedules and provisioning lists and what you need to set up a boat and all of that, so I would I spent a lot of time kind of compiling all those documentations into a file for her so that her job was going to be as easy as possible."
Simply put, "I want her to succeed," Hannah added. "She's a friend of mine and I think that so often people in life are either jealous or they're trying to kind of go, 'Oh, well, I had to do it myself, so you do it yourself too.' It's like, 'No, we're friends. We need to help each other.'"
In what should come as no surprise to Below Deck Med fans, Hannah isn't exactly friends with all of her former co-stars—namelyMalia White, who was the one to tell Capt. Sandy that Hannah hadundeclared Valium and a CBD pen on board, leading to her dismissal. (Hannah has since explained that the Valium was prescribed and the CBD was legal where they were sailing.)
Thankfully for Hannah, most viewers took her side. "I think for every nine positive comments I'd get one negative, or not even," she told E! News. "It was very much in my favor. And I think was good because it's an important conversation to have."
"It was definitely a technicality because I hadn't declared my medication," Hannah continued, explaining that she was mostly upset with the way the situation was "handled."
"Saying, 'You have drugs on board. Are you going to flush your drugs?' blah, blah," she recalled,"I was like, 'Why would I flush my medication down the toilet?' You shouldn't put that stigma where prescription medications for mental illness and recreational drugs are treated in the same way."
Though Malia was the one to essentially facilitate Hannah's firing, looking back, Hannah sees Capt. Sandy as the "bigger villain."
"I feel like we'd even been in many situations whereshe would have liked to see the same result," Hannah said, "but it couldn't happen. So I feel like with her, it was very much like, 'Yes, now I've got something!'"
Added the Bravo alum, "It just felt like there was so much behind-the-scenes stuff with Sandy that nobody ever saw."
At the end of the day, "it's just a job," Hannah said. "It's just a TV show and it's not who I am and it's not how I define myself."
After all, since leaving Below Deck Med, Hannah's made quite the life for herself. She and her longtime partner Josh Roberts welcomed their first child together, a daughter named Ava Grace Roberts, andin March, the couple said "I do" in a beach wedding. Read all about the nuptials here.
Catch more of Hannah by streaming past seasons of Below Deck Mediterranean on Peaco*ck. Season seven of the show premieres Monday, July 11 at 8 p.m. on Bravo, withnew episodes dropping one week early on Peaco*ck beginning Monday, July 4.
This article was originally published at8:30 a.m. on March 26, 2022.
(E!, Bravo and Peaco*ck are all part of the NBCUniversal family.)
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